Adventures of a multidimensional freak

This is Juan Julián Merelo Guervós English-language blog. He teaches computer science at the University of Granada, in southern Spain. Come back here to read about politics, technology, with a new twist

Mathematicians figure out the mystery of traffic jams. Slashdot points out to this article in PhysOrg, which explains, quite simply, that when something slows the traffic, every driver behing brakes and slows down a bit more than the previous one, leading to the obvious conclusion that there will be one that stops altogether.
Avoiding the obvious, which is that people don't behave as systematically, and that if the progression of braking is not exactly monotonical, that will never happen, I'd like to see that same problem simulated, which will probably yield completely different results. Besides, I remember having seen that representation of traffic as waves twenty years ago in a book about waves (whose title I can't find, which means it's really old)